Right now that means you. I am not a curio, my friend. Or rather I am a curio, but you’d have to say the curio, the best one of all. Only the very curious acquire curios like this. And you are a curious person, you look into the medicine cabinets in the bathrooms of people you hardly know, you’re an avid listener, you’re driven to listen, you’ll listen to anything. I understand you: I too was curious once, like you. We are both the kind of person who takes the corks out of bottles. Not bottles of wine: bottles of sand.
II.
WINTER’S TALES
Once upon a time, you say, there were germs with horns. They lived in the toilet and could only be defeated by gallons and gallons of bleach. You could commit suicide by drinking this bleach, and some women did.
The young look up at you, wide-eyed. Or maybe they look down at you: they’ve become very tall. How young are the young, these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old. But they are still credulous, because you were there, once upon a time, and they weren’t.
Not only that, you say—you’re enjoying this—there were no bare midriffs, and only sailors and convicts had tattoos. There were no telephones, there were no vaccinations; so you couldn’t call the doctor when you were dying, of burst glands, of stagnant intestinal bloats, of webs inside your throat, of brain fever. If you had unprotected intercourse your nose dropped off, a lot sooner than it does now.
The young are still listening. Do they believe you? Have you been sensational enough for them? You certainly hope so.
If you were a married woman, it was all over at thirty, you say. You were doomed to put on a print dress and a rubber girdle and sit in a rocking chair on the porch—there were porches, back then—fanning yourself, because there was no air conditioning, and talking about your flat feet, your sciatica, your varicose veins, and the snoring habits of your husband, whose shirts you had to iron, every Tuesday—mountains of shirts. All of these were metaphors for unsatisfactory sex.